There has been some pretty impressive movements in the NFT space this past week. According to recent news, the NFT ‘whale’ known as ‘Machi Big Brother’ reportedly sold over 1,060 NFT in a 48-hour span, amounting to $18.6 million at the time.
What’s strange is that following this massive-scale sell-off, Machi then bought back over 990 of them. The whole affair makes for one of the more unusual events to take place on an NFT market.
For context, a whale generally refers to one of the big financial movers in the crypto and NFT markets, whose investments and financial movements have a profound effect on these markets as a whole. In the past, for example, NFT whales have caused the likes of BAYC’s NFTs to drop by 12% simply by selling their assets.
For instance, Machi Big Brother sold 90 Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs, and that resulted in the floor price for BAYC NFTs dropping 12%.
While this can be construed as just shrewd trading, other commentators are more inclined to believe that its a form a market manipulation, with Machi acting on behalf of the NFT marketplace – Blur.
While operating as a direct challenger to OpenSea, Blur has been gathering an unprecedented amount of momentum in scooping up disaffected traders.
More importantly, it’s proving successful in this campaign through its rewards scheme, in which traders are rewarded to traders who bid and sell NFTs in high volumes. One of the major beneficiaries of this rewards scheme is actually Machi Big Brother, who actually managed to earn $1.8 million in $BLUR thanks to his trades.